When you as a user search for something online, you type in some words in the search bar to get the desired results. These words that you type are what we call keywords. Knowledge of keywords are important to digital marketers and SEO experts as it helps in connecting the user with their website. The better the use of keywords, the better the chances of a higher ranking of your website. In this post, I will explain what a keyword is, what are the different types of keywords and some of the examples to help you understand it better.
What are Keywords?
Keywords are words or phrases that you incorporate into your website content to make your web pages searchable for the users. These are the words or phrases that can help describe what is your content about.
Say you wrote a good article on some topic such as dealing with stress. Then when the user who is searching for information on this topic may write “How to deal with stress in life”. Now these words written by the user “how to deal with stress in life” are the keywords. And if a lot of users are searching the same or similar terms then this keyword becomes an important keyword. If you include these keywords in your article, then the chances of your article appearing on the first page of Google will be very high.
Also, as we saw in the previous example, a keyword is a word a user types in to search for something. So, keywords can help in defining what your content is about. Keywords help in directing the user to your content when used appropriately. This happens because keywords define what this content can offer to the user.
Importance of Keywords in SEO and Digital Marketing
Developing an understanding of keywords is very important if you want to connect with a large audience or customers. When you write any content on your website you want to make sure it is in alignment with the user intent so that users or customers can interact with your website or business. Some key points describing the importance of keywords are as follows:
1. Increase in Ranking:
When the content on your web page is nicely optimized with relevant keywords, search engines like Google will rank your website higher on the search results page. This happens because the content that has keywords that the user is searching for, the search engine identifies your content as more relevant and shows it to the user.
2. Increase in Traffic:
When the web pages of your website are ranking higher, the chances more volume of users clicking on your website increases. And if your content is truly valuable, then the retention rate of the user will also increase further increasing the traffic on the website.
3. Competitive Advantage:
For every niche, there is a lot of content available from various websites and businesses. But even if the content is the same the website having content optimized with the relevant keywords will rank higher as compared to its competitor. So having a good knowledge of the keywords can give you a competitive advantage over your competitors.
4. Creating Content with the users in mind:
When we create content by doing proper keyword research, we create content that is relevant to the user. If we don’t research keywords beforehand, we may create content that is useful to us but for some narrow bracket of people. This content could be good but may not be something that people are searching for. So doing keyword research gives us an idea of what users are searching for. By doing that we can write content that best provides the value a user needs.
Types of keywords in SEO
Now that we know what a keyword is and its importance, we can learn about what are the various types of keywords.
1. Short Tail Keywords
Short tail keywords are keywords a user types for getting information regarding some general and broad queries. For example India, world news, coffee, off-shoulder top, etc. These are usually of a short length of about three words or less.
2. Long Tail Keywords
These are the keywords that a user searches to get answers to a specific query. Long tail keywords have a narrow and specific intent. It gives more information to the search engines and is mostly of more than three words.
For example: Black off-shoulder top for women. Here a broader topic “off-shoulder top” is specified and the search range is narrowed down.
3. Navigational keyword
These are the keywords a user writes to visit a particular website. Here the direction of the results is already specified leading to a specific web page on the top.
For example: “Black off-shoulder top for woman on Myntra”. Here the user is intending to visit Myntra website specifically to search for this top. So, this keyword is navigational.
4. Fresh keywords
These are the keywords that are related to a topic that is trending at the moment. These are fresh keywords, and these could be completely new keywords or something that was not popular before but now it is getting a lot of volume.
For example ChatGPT (when it was launched), earthquake now in Delhi, Diwali sale 2024, and so on.
5. Evergreen keywords
As opposed to fresh keywords, evergreen keywords are related to topics that are relevant almost all the time. These are searched most of the time or periodically in their seasons. The volume and searches of these keywords are usually significant in number.
For example: Tasty recipes, climate change, etc.
6. Product defining keywords
Product-defining keywords are used to specify what product a user is looking for. It defines the characteristics of the product.
For example: “White sports shoes with black stripes”.
7. Customer defining keywords
Keywords that help identify the characteristics of a customer looking for some product or service.
For example: “White sports shoes with black stripes for men”.
8. Geo-targeting keywords
These are the keywords that are used to search a specific area or location.
For example: “Best places to hang out in Netaji Subhash Place in Delhi”.
9. LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords
LSI keywords are words that are related to the main or primary keyword a user is typing. These keywords are important as they help a user come to a relevant result even if that piece of content does not use the primary keyword.
For example: For the primary keyword “Books”, the LSI are Reading, author, fiction, genres, nonfiction, inspiration, reviews, etc.
10. Intent targeting keywords
Intent-targeting keywords help define user intent. These types of keywords can be three types: informational, commercial, and transactional keywords.
Informational keywords:
Informational keywords are used to search for information regarding a specific topic. It does not really specify whether the user will buy that product or service or not. It is just used to search for information.
Example: “Black trousers”.
Commercial Keywords:
These keywords are used to research before deciding to buy a product. This could include searching for reviews, articles, etc.
Example: “Black trouser prices”.
Transactional Keywords:
These keywords are used by a customer when he or she has decided to buy a product and is ready to buy it.
Example: “Buy black trousers online”.
So, this was a beginner’s guide to keywords used in SEO and digital marketing. I hope it you found some value from it.
Responses (0 )